The Heart of the Matter

  ‘I don’t think so. I suppose presently he’ll have to go to the Argyll.’

  Scobie thought: I wish I had known what I had been looking at. Robinson was exhibiting the most enviable possession a man can own—a happy death. This tour would bear a high proportion of deaths—or perhaps not so high when you counted them and remembered Europe. First Pemberton, then the child at Pende, now Robinson … no, it wasn’t many, but of course he hadn’t counted the blackwater cases in the military hospital.

  ‘So that’s how matters stand,’ the Commissioner said. ‘Next tour you will be Commissioner. Your wife will be pleased.’

  I must endure her pleasure, Scobie thought, without anger. I am the guilty man, and I have no right to criticize, to show vexation ever again. He said, ‘I’ll be getting home.’

  Ali stood by his car, talking to another boy who slipped quietly away when he saw Scobie approach. ‘Who was that, Ali?’

  ‘My small brother, sah,’ Ali said.

  ‘I don’t know him, do I? Same mother?’

  ‘No, sah, same father.’

  ‘What does he do?’ Ali worked at the starting handle, his face dripping with sweat, saying nothing.

  ‘Who does he work for, Ali?’

  ‘Sah?’

  ‘I said who does he work for?’

  ‘For Mr Wilson, sah.’

  The engine started and Ali climbed into the back seat. ‘Has he ever made you a proposition, Ali? I mean has he asked you to report on me—for money?’ He could see Ali’s face in the driving mirror, set, obstinate, closed and rocky like a cave mouth. ‘No, sah.’

  ‘Lots of people are interested in me and pay good money for reports. They think me bad man, Ali.’

  Ali said, ‘I’m your boy,’ staring back through the medium of the mirror. It seemed to Scobie one of the qualities of deceit that you lost the sense of trust. If I can lie and betray, so can others. Wouldn’t many people gamble on my honesty and lose their stake? Why should I lose my stake on Ali? I have not been caught and he has not been caught, that’s all. An awful depression weighed his head towards the wheel. He thought: I know that Ali is honest: I have known that for fifteen years; I am just trying to find a companion in this region of lies. Is the next stage the stage of corrupting others?

  Louise was not in when they arrived. Presumably someone had called and taken her out—perhaps to the beach. She hadn’t expected him back before sundown. He wrote a note for her, Taking some furniture up to Helen. Will be back early with good news for you, and then he drove up alone to the Nissen huts through the bleak empty middle day. Only the vultures were about—gathering round a dead chicken at the edge of the road, stooping their old men’s necks over the carrion, their wings like broken umbrellas sticking out this way and that.

  ‘I’ve brought you another table and a couple of chairs. Is your boy about?’

  ‘No, he’s at market.’

  They kissed as formally now when they met as a brother and sister. When the damage was done adultery became as unimportant as friendship. The flame had licked them and gone on across the clearing: it had left nothing standing except a sense of responsibility and a sense of loneliness. Only if you trod barefooted did you notice the heat in the grass. Scobie said, ‘I’m interrupting your lunch.’

  ‘Oh no. I’ve about finished. Have some fruit salad.’

  ‘It’s time you had a new table. This one wobbles.’ He said, ‘They are making me Commissioner after all.’

  ‘It will please your wife,’ Helen said,

  ‘It doesn’t mean a thing to me.’

  ‘Oh, of course it does,’ she said briskly. This was another convention of hers—that only she suffered. He would for a long time resist, like Coriolanus, the exhibition of his wounds, but sooner or later he would give way: he would dramatize his pain in words until even to himself it seemed unreal. Perhaps, he would think, she is right after all: perhaps I don’t suffer. She said, ‘Of course the Commissioner must be above suspicion, mustn’t he, like Caesar.’ (Her sayings, as well as her spelling, lacked accuracy) ‘This is the end of us, I suppose.’

  ‘You know there is no end to us.’

  ‘Oh, but the Commissioner can’t have a mistress hidden away in a Nissen hut.’ The sting, of course, was in the ‘hidden away,’ but how could he allow himself to feel the least irritation, remembering the letter she had written to him, offering herself as a sacrifice any way he liked, to keep or to throw away? Human beings couldn’t be heroic all the time: those who surrendered everything—for God or love—must be allowed sometimes in thought to take back their surrender. So many had never committed the heroic act, however rashly. It was the act that counted. He said, ‘If the Commissioner can’t keep you, then I shan’t be the Commissioner.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. After all,’ she said with fake reasonableness, and he recognized this as one of her bad days, ‘what do we get out of it?’

  ‘I get a lot,’ he said, and wondered: is that a lie for the sake of comfort? There were so many lies nowadays he couldn’t keep track of the small, the unimportant ones.

  ‘An hour of two every other day perhaps when you can slip away. Never so much as a night.’

  He said hopelessly, ‘Oh, I have plans.’

  ‘What plans?’

  He said, ‘They are too vague still.’

  She said with all the acid she could squeeze out, ‘Well, let me know in time. To fall in with your wishes, I mean.’

  ‘My dear, I haven’t come here to quarrel.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder what you do come here for.’

  ‘Well, today I brought some furniture.’

  ‘Oh yes, the furniture.’

  ‘I’ve got the car here. Let me take you to the beach.’

  ‘Oh, we can’t be seen there together.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. Louise is there now, I think.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Helen said, ‘keep that smug woman out of my sight.’

  ‘All right then. I’ll take you for a run in the car.’

  ‘That would be safer, wouldn’t it?’

  Scobie took her by the shoulders and said, ‘I’m not always thinking of safety.’

  ‘I thought you were.’

  Suddenly he felt his resistance give way and he shouted at her, ‘The sacrifice isn’t all on your side.’ With despair he could see from a distance the scene coming up on both of them: like the tornado before the rains, that wheeling column of blackness which would soon cover the whole sky.

  ‘Of course work must suffer,’ she said with childish sarcasm. ‘All these snatched half-hours.’

  ‘I’ve given up hope,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve given up the future. I’ve damned myself.’

  ‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Anyway, you’ve just told me about the future—the Commissionership.’

  ‘I mean the real future—the future that goes on.’

  She said, ‘If there’s one thing I hate it’s your Catholicism. I suppose it comes of having a pious wife. It’s so bogus. If you really believed you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘But I do believe and I am here.’ He said with bewilderment, ‘I can’t explain it, but there it is. My eyes are open. I know what I’m doing. When Father Rank came down to the rail carrying the sacrament …’

  Helen exclaimed with scorn and impatience, ‘You’ve told me all that before. You are trying to impress me. You don’t believe in Hell any more than I do.’

  He took her wrists and held them furiously. He said, ‘You can’t get out of it that way. I believe, I tell you. I believe that I’m damned for all eternity—unless a miracle happens. I’m a policeman. I know what I’m saying. What I’ve done is far worse than murder—that’s an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it’s over and done, but I’m carrying my corruption around with me. It’s the coating of my stomach.’ He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. ‘Never pretend I have
n’t shown my love.’

  ‘Love for your wife, you mean. You were afraid she’d find out.’

  Anger drained out of him. He said, ‘Love for both of you. If it were just for her there’d be an easy straight way.’ He put his hands over his eyes, feeling hysteria beginning to mount again. He said, ‘I can’t bear to see suffering, and I cause it all the time. I want to get out, get out.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog. He said, ‘Oh, I just mean take a holiday.’ He added, ‘I’m not sleeping well. And I’ve been getting an odd pain.’

  ‘Darling, are you ill?’ The pillar had wheeled on its course: the storm was involving others now: it had passed beyond them. Helen said, ‘Darling, I’m a bitch. I get tired and fed up with things—but it doesn’t mean anything. Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘I’ll see Travis at the Argyll some time soon.’

  ‘Everybody says Dr Sykes is better.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to see Dr Sykes.’ Now that the anger and hysteria had passed he could see her exactly as she was that first evening when the sirens blew. He thought, O God, I can’t leave her. Or Louise. You don’t need me as they need me. You have your good people, your saints, all the company of the blessed. You can do without me. He said. ‘I’ll take you for a spin now in the car. It will do us both good.’

  In the dusk of the garage he took her hands again and kissed her. He said, ‘There are no eyes here … Wilson can’t see us. Harris isn’t watching. Yusef’s boys …’

  ‘Dear, I’d leave you tomorrow if it would help.’

  ‘It wouldn’t help.’ He said, ‘You remember when I wrote you a letter—which got lost. I tried to put down everything there, plainly, in black and white. So as not to be cautious any more. I wrote that I loved you more than my wife …’ As he spoke he heard another’s breath behind his shoulder, beside the car. He said, sharply, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘Somebody’s here.’ He came round to the other side of the car and said sharply, ‘Who’s there? Come out.’

  ‘It’s Ali,’ Helen said.

  ‘What are you doing here, Ali?’

  ‘Missus sent me,’ Ali said. ‘I wait here for Massa tell him Missus back.’ He was hardly visible in the shadow.

  ‘Why were you waiting here?’

  ‘My head humbug me,’ Ali said. ‘l go for sleep, small, small sleep.’

  ‘Don’t frighten him,’ Helen said. ‘He’s telling the truth.’

  ‘Go along home, Ali,’ Scobie told him, ‘and tell Missus I come straight down.’ He watched him pad out into the hard sunlight between the Nissen huts. He never looked back.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ Helen said. ‘He didn’t understand a thing.’

  ‘I’ve had Ali for fifteen years,’ Scobie said. It was the first time he had been ashamed before him in all those years. He remembered Ali the night after Pemberton’s death, cup of tea in hand, holding him up against the shaking lorry, and then he remembered Wilson’s boy slinking off along the wall by the police station.

  ‘You can trust him, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve lost the trick of trust.’

  II

  Louise was asleep upstairs, and Scobie sat at the table with his diary open. He had written down against the date October 31: Commissioner told me this morning I am to succeed him. Took some furniture to H.R. Told Louise news, which pleased her. The other life—bare and undisturbed and built of facts—lay like Roman foundations under his hand. This was the life he was supposed to lead; no one reading this record would visualize the obscure shameful scene in the garage, the interview with the Portuguese captain, Louise striking out blindly with the painful truth, Helen accusing him of hypocrisy … He thought: this is how it ought to be. I am too old for emotion. I am too old to be a cheat. Lies are for the young. They have a lifetime of truth to recover in. He looked at his watch, 11.45, and wrote: Temperature at 2 p.m. 92º. The lizard pounced upon the wall, the tiny jaws clamping on a moth. Something scratched outside the door—a pye-dog? He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him. No man surely was less alone with his wife upstairs and his mistress little more than five hundred yards away up the hill, and yet it was loneliness that seated itself like a companion who doesn’t need to speak. It seemed to him that he had never been so alone before.

  There was nobody now to whom he could speak the truth. There were things the Commissioner must not know, Louise must not know, there were even limits to what he could tell Helen, for what was the use, when he had sacrificed so much in order to avoid pain, of inflicting it needlessly? As for God he could speak to Him only as one speaks to an enemy—there was bitterness between them. He moved his hand on the table, and it was as though his loneliness moved too and touched the tips of his fingers. ‘You and I,’ his loneliness said, ‘you and I.’ It occurred to him that the outside world if they knew the facts might envy him: Bagster would envy him Helen, and Wilson Louise. What a hell of a quiet dog, Fraser would exclaim with a lick of the lips. They would imagine, he thought with amazement, that I get something out of it, but it seemed to him that no man had ever got less. Even self-pity was denied him because he knew so exactly the extent of his guilt. He felt as though he had exiled himself so deeply in the desert that his skin had taken on the colour of the sand.

  The door creaked gently open behind him. Scobie did not move. The spies, he thought, are creeping in. Is this Wilson, Harris, Pemberton’s boy, Ali …? ‘Massa,’ a voice whispered, and a bare foot slapped the concrete floor.

  ‘Who are you?’ Scobie asked not turning round. A pink palm dropped a small ball of paper on the table and went out of sight again. The voice said, ‘Yusef say come very quiet nobody see.’

  ‘What does Yusef want now?’

  ‘He send you dash—small small dash.’ Then the door closed again and silence was back. Loneliness said, ‘Let us open this together, you and I.’

  Scobie picked up the ball of paper: It was light, but it had a small hard centre. At first he didn’t realize what it was: he thought it was a pebble put in to keep the paper steady and he looked for writing which, of course, was not there, for whom would Yusef trust to write for him? Then he realized what it was—a diamond, a gem stone. He knew nothing about diamonds, but it seemed to him that it was probably worth at least as much as his debt to Yusef. Presumably Yusef had information that the stones he had sent by the Esperança had reached their destination safely. This was a mark of gratitude—not a bribe, Yusef would explain, the fat hand upon his sincere and shallow heart.

  The door burst open and there was Ali. He had a boy by the arm who whimpered. Ali said, ‘This stinking Mende boy he go all round the house. He try doors.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Scobie said.

  The boy broke out in a mixture of fear and rage, ‘I Yusef’s boy. I bring Massa letter,’ and he pointed at the table where the pebble lay in the screw of paper. Ali’s eyes followed the gesture. Scobie said to his loneliness, ‘You and I have to think quickly.’ He turned on the boy and said, ‘Why you not come here properly and knock on the door? Why you come like a thief?’

  He had the thin body and the melancholy soft eyes of all Mendes. He said, ‘I not a thief,’ with so slight an emphasis on the first word that it was just possible he was not impertinent. He went on, ‘Massa tell me to come very quiet.’

  Scobie said, ‘Take this back to Yusef and tell him I want to know where he gets a stone like that. I think he steals stones and I find out by-and-by. Go on. Take it. Now, Ali, throw him out.’ Ali pushed the boy ahead of him through the door, and Scobie could hear the rustle of their feet on the path. Were they whispering together? He went to the door and called out after them, ‘Tell Yusef I call on him one night soon and make hell of a palaver.’ He slammed the door again and thought, what a lot Ali knows, and he felt distrust of his boy moving again li
ke fever with the bloodstream. He could ruin me, he thought: he could ruin them.

  He poured himself out a glass of whisky and took a bottle of soda out of his ice-box. Louise called from upstairs, ‘Henry.’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘Is it twelve yet?’

  ‘Close on, I think.’

  ‘You won’t drink anything after twelve, will you? You remember tomorrow?’ and of course he did remember, draining his glass: it was November the First—All Saints’ Day, and this All Souls’ Night. What ghost would pass over the whisky’s surface? ‘You are coming to communion, aren’t you, dear?’ and he thought wearily: there is no end to this: why should I draw the line now? One may as well go on damning oneself until the end. His loneliness was the only ghost his whisky could invoke, nodding across the table at him, taking a drink out of his glass. ‘The next occasion,’ loneliness told him, ‘will be Christmas—the Midnight Mass—you won’t be able to avoid that you know, and no excuse will serve you on that night and after that’—the long chain of feast days, of early Masses in spring and summer, unrolled themselves like a perpetual calendar. He had a sudden picture before his eyes of a bleeding face, of eyes closed by the continuous shower of blows: the punch-drunk head of God reeling sideways.

  ‘You are coming, Ticki?’ Louise called with what seemed to him a sudden anxiety, as though perhaps suspicion had momentarily breathed on her again—and he thought again, can Ali really be trusted? and all the stale coast wisdom of the traders and the remittance men told him, ‘Never trust a black. They’ll let you down in the end. Had my boy fifteen years …’ The ghosts of distrust came out on All Souls’ Night and gathered around his glass.

  ‘Oh yes, my dear, I’m coming.’

  ‘You have only to say the word,’ he addressed God, ‘and legions of angels …’ and he struck with his ringed hand under the eye and saw the bruised skin break. He thought, ‘And again at Christmas,’ thrusting the Child’s face into the filth of the stable. He cried up the stairs, ‘What’s that you said, dear?’